


A Cold Embrace

by scioscribe



Category: The Babadook (2014)
Genre: Future Fic, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Horror, Off-screen Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:28:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27917500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: His arms are long, his friends will find. / They even reach inside your mind. / Every day they grow and grow / to hug you tight. He won’t let go!(Years later, as Samuel struggles to come to terms with his mum's death, he finds an all-too-familiar book... and everything that comes with it.)
Comments: 11
Kudos: 41
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	A Cold Embrace

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lionessvalenti](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lionessvalenti/gifts).



Samuel was reaching for a cookbook, not looking, stirring with his left hand and reaching with his right, when his fingers hit something that made them go numb. It was like he’d thrust his hand into a bucket of ice-water. When he pulled it back and looked, he saw livid red papercuts sliced across his skin.

He looked at what he had touched—not even grabbed hold of, just grazed—and then dropped the spoon.

The book, shelved right next to his cookbooks like it belonged there, had a green cloth cover. Printed across its spine, in gold leaf:

_THE BABADOOK_

“No,” he heard himself say. “No, it can’t be. It can’t be following me. It’s still in the basement, it’s _still in the basement_.”

But was it? How could it be? His mum was gone, and the house was sold.

“Awfully musty down there,” the real estate agent had said. “We found some strange things. Your mum, was she all right, at the end?”

“Yes,” Samuel had said sharply. “She was always all right.”

“Well, I don’t mind telling you it wasn’t like anything I’d seen before.”

He was paying for cleaners, wasn’t he? And a hauling crew. He didn’t need these phone calls that made black stars flit around in front of his eyes; he didn’t need to hear other people talking about him and his mum and what they’d done to make a life. He knew what the basement was like. He knew sometimes the plates broke, leaving shards of crockery around that neither of them would dare pick up. He knew there was wormy soil and maggoty roadkill strewn about. He knew what could get left behind, when what was living there was being looked at by someone who didn’t understand. Heavy-duty plastic trash bags and cockroaches and damp wallpaper and scribbled-out pictures. It sloughed those things off of it, along with an endless flood of ink, ink that had sometimes bristled with half-rusted nails. He knew all that.

And he knew the book was _red_ , the book had been _red_ , and it was gone, it was supposed to be gone—

It wasn’t supposed to have outlived her. It wasn’t fair. None of it was fair.

He could smell the sauce scorching in the pan. He turned off the burners and put the pan aside.

He wasn’t hungry anymore.

 _Why don’t you just go eat shit?_ he thought dimly.

He took the book down and sat at the kitchen table. The cover got blotted with his blood, the green turning black where his papercuts touched it.

“I don’t have to open you.” Samuel said. His voice was unsteady. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to let you in. Just because she’s gone now doesn’t mean you get me.”

Unless it was his inheritance, more real and visceral than the little bit of money she’d been able to pass on, more lasting than the house he hadn’t wanted to go back to. Unless he truly did own it now, like it was a family heirloom.

The shadows in the corners of the kitchen seemed taller, spikier.

It was just the broom, he told himself. The broom leaning against the wall.

He looked down and saw that he’d opened the book. Even on the white pages, his blood still looked black. Like charcoal, like soot, like ink.

His copy had no illustrations.

_His arms are long, his friends will find._

_They even reach inside your mind._

_Every day they grow and grow_

_to hug you tight. He won’t let go!_

_He’ll wrap you in his cold embrace,_

_and then he’ll show you his true face._

_Won’t that be fun? You’ll scream and shout_

_when you see what he is all about._

_The Babadook does not forget,_

_however old he lets you get._

_Your time is up, you’ve reached the end._

_Now welcome him, your oldest friend._

“I don’t. I don’t.” He was whispering, he realized, and he needed to be louder.

But if he were louder, it would hear him.

 _It needs to hear you,_ he heard his mum say, her voice icy-calm, the way she got when things were very, very bad. _It needs to hear you, Samuel, or it won’t go away._

_But it never goes away. It never has. You can’t get rid of the Babadook._

“I don’t welcome you,” he said. It was a little louder now. “I don’t want you to come in. But—but if you do, I know what to do with you. I do. She showed me.”

But he’d sold the house, and he didn’t have a basement or a storm cellar. Would a closet hold it?

“I’m not letting you in. I’m not, I don’t. You can’t come in.”

That night, he moved the broom out of the corner of the kitchen, so it would stop throwing its skinny shadow on the wall. It was four in the morning before he fell asleep, and he dreamed of his mum in pale pink, her old uniform from the home. She was on her hands and knees in the dark, glowing like a night light, and she was eating crumbling handfuls of dirt, dark soil spilling down the front of her dress. Her hair was falling down, making little slashes of light across her dirt-stained cheeks.

“It’s not you,” Samuel said. “I know it’s not. You said it liked to look like my dad, but it wasn’t him, so it’s not you.”

“I never wanted to be a mother,” the mum-thing said.

“No.” His voice sounded froggy, and he hated it. “No, she wanted to be a mum. She was a good mum. She just didn’t want my dad to die, and it was hard for a while—it was hard and you got in, she couldn’t keep you out. But she made it, and you can’t say she didn’t. She made it for _years_ , she didn’t die because of you. We made it, and she loved me.”

It sat back on its heels and laughed through his mum’s mouth, her white teeth black with dirt.

“I’m not letting you in,” Samuel said. His face was wet, and everything tasted like salt. “I know what you are, and you’re not my mum.”

He woke up with the sheets soaked through with sweat. He didn’t look at the shadows looming over the half-open bedroom door. He didn’t look, so he didn’t see anything. He didn’t.

In the morning, with all the sashes open and blinds pulled clear to let in every scrap of sunlight he could, he took his winter coat and boots and rain jacket out of the hall closet. He took out the vacuum cleaner. He took out the crossbow he’d carried everywhere when he was seven, the one that had gone to university with him stuffed inside a rolled-up sleeping bag he’d never unrolled for anyone.

There was enough space in the now-empty closet for a bowl of dirt. He didn’t know if there was enough space for the Babadook. And even if there was, he didn’t know that the door was strong enough to hold it.

But it was all he had.

He tried to live a normal life—he tried even harder, after the book, than he had tried for all the years before that, on the days when being normal had felt impossible. He cleaned out the saucepan. He went to work. He remembered to send a gift for Ruby’s birthday. When she asked how he was doing, after his mum, he said he was fine. It had been three months, he said. Of course he was still sad, but he was fine, really. She didn’t have to be careful around him. He was absolutely fine.

***

Chalked on the footpath in front of his house one day was a hopscotch court. Not all of the squares had numbers in them. Some of them just had syllables, two-letter sounds: _BA BA DO OK._

Samuel rubbed his eyes. No, they were numbered. They were all only numbered after all.

He remembered his mum and Mrs. Roach drawing out a hopscotch court for him. His mum had sat back on her heels, pastel chalk smeared all over her hands, the sun in her hair. “This will be a much better use of that balance of yours than climbing the swings in the park and scaring the life out of me,” she had said. “Let’s see how you do on one foot.”

“I’ll be unstoppable,” Samuel had promised. He’d really believed he would be, too.

He looked at the chalked-out squares now and imagined hopping through them, the slap of his loafers against the concrete footpath like a knock on a door.

***

At night, his bedroom filled up with a musty smell, thick with dust and cellar rot. It stank of mold and old wet stone. He lay there in bed, pinned down by heavy folds of black cloth, the Babadook’s coat brushing over his face, dusty-silky with cobwebs and crawling with worms. This was how he’d felt when he’d been small, back before the Babadook: like the world was swarming with terrors that no one else would even talk about. Only back then he’d had his weapons, something other than a faulty crossbow that had probably gotten too battered to shoot true. Back then he’d had that little-kid illusion that he could handle it all if he was just brave enough. Back then he’d had his mum.

***

He didn’t touch his cookbooks. He didn’t touch any books at all, and it didn’t even matter. It showed up on his phone, the letters jagged and spindly, frozen there until he reset it.

_You still have all your mother took._

_You can’t get rid of the Babadook._

***

Samuel was eating cereal one morning, trying hard to think of nothing at all, when he saw the long, thin shadows his hands were casting against the table. The black shapes tapered off to points.

He put the bowl in the sink and walked away. He hadn’t eaten too many proper meals since she’d died, he realized. Mostly odd things at odd times, cold spaghetti at two in the morning and Tim Tams for breakfast. Broken glass in potato soup. He needed meat and veg. He needed to sleep. He remembered his mum saying that, over and over again, a long time ago.

He had sat in hospital with her, all the time in the last few days. He wanted to be there holding her hand. He had tried to hard not to bruise her, but it was like her skin had gotten thinner, especially close to the IV port. Her hands were black-and-blue.

She hadn’t been in any pain, the doctors had said. She’d said the same thing, when she was lucid, and she hadn’t lied to him. They hadn’t lied to each other.

 _But you should have told me,_ Samuel thought. He felt like his head was on fire with exhaustion and terror. He was full of open spaces for other things to move in. _You should have told me it would happen this way. You should have told me to clean out the basement for myself._

It didn’t matter what the cleaners had done. It wouldn’t matter even if the new people who moved in carpeted the cellar and put some kind of rec room in there. He hadn’t gone there himself, he hadn’t _evicted_ it, and now it was here, way down in some pit inside his mind.

“I packed all your dad’s things away, remember,” his mum had said once, when he was old enough to really feel it—when he’d been at uni, maybe. She had a scrim of dirt under her fingernails, and she was tapping one finger against the china bowl: clack, clack, click. Not a knocking. Nothing that gave either of them the shakes. “I think they it’s like they festered, and they sloughed it off of them. Everything turns sour, down in the dark.”

He had let his life turn. Let her death turn.

He had to put an end to it somehow. He had to get some fucking sleep.

He went out of the house quickly, not letting himself think about it, and filled a bowl with dirt from the garden. Not especially wormy, this bit, and its scent was sharp from the crystals of fertilizer, jagged like grains of salt. He didn’t think it was what the Babadook would like. It was too lively for it.

But there were kids on the hopscotch court, their tennis shoes smacking against the ground: _ba-ba-ba-dook-dook-dook._ He couldn’t stay out there.

_That’s when you know that he’s around. You’ll see him if you look._

He did. God, he did. He couldn’t stop.

When he came back in through the front door, he stopped dead.

There was a top hat slung on his coat rack. When Samuel touched it, it deliquesced under his hand into something dark and pitchy and sluggish, and he thought, _It’s her blood, it’s Mum’s blood, dead blood, whatever was still in her when she died. It drank her dry and now it’s here._

Something inside him snapped, _crushed_. Not a dry twig sound, but a rich crunch, like cartilage, like what he’d imagined Ruby’s nose had sounded like when it had broken, that time he had pushed her, that time she had said his dad had died just to keep away from him. It was the sound of something living getting stepped on, stomped until it was flat.

He rushed to the sink and stuck his hand under the tap, sending water thundering down on it. It was scalding hot, so hot he felt his skin start to blister.

There was nothing on him. His hands were clean.

It had just used her to toy with him, like she was some sort of flag to wave to get him to pounce, to do something stupid.

“You don’t get her!” He was shouting, sobbing. He flung the bowl at the wall, hard, and it shattered like a bomb, dirt flying everywhere. “You don’t get to crawl all over her. You can’t make everything awful. It wasn’t _like that_.” It hadn’t all been just blood and shadows and mud streaked on the cellar floor. They had had a life, a good life, and he should have just cleared out the basement, he knew he should have, but it had been so many years since he’d had to see it, he hadn’t wanted it to be his—

But it was. It was the same book, in the end, just bound up like something new. The words had changed, but it was still the same old story.

Samuel gathered up all the pieces of the broken china and dumped them in the closet, along with the handfuls of dirt.

“There.” He wiped angrily at his eyes. “Eat your fucking fill of it. Just keep your teeth out of her and me.”

***

In the morning, the dirt was still there. It was just crawling with maggots, each one of them plump and shiny, polished like the varnished point of a fingernail.

***

For three days in a row, the news Samuel read was all the same.

Local man found dead in his own home. A loner, neighbors said. Very troubled. Family history of instability and mental illness.

Violent as a child, unnamed family member reports.

Someone in the comments said, “Wouldn’t be surprised if you find the bodies once you start looking for them. That kind’s always bound to go wrong.”

Someone else said, “I heard he killed his mother.”

“I heard she was just the same way. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

***

The family who had bought the old house was due to arrive any day now, and they’d already had some of their things moved in ahead of them.

Samuel walked through a twilight gray house filled with boxes that didn’t belong there, boxes that stood out against the floorboards like broken teeth: here was a future so sharp you could cut yourself. They had moved in a baby grand piano made out of black walnut, and Samuel couldn’t help touching it. He left a thumbprint on the gloss, his messy life rubbing up against their smooth one, just for a little while. He’d played the drums a bit, as a kid. He’d liked hitting things. He’d liked making noise.

He was going to go downstairs, all the way down, and he was going to deal with it. He didn’t know how. But he had a pocketful of dirt. And if ghosts were real, he had one on his side.

He went down. Into the dark.

Thank God they’d already turned the power back on. He could still stretch out his hand and find the rat-tail-thin cord, and he gave it a hard pull. He was half-prepared for the bulb to burst, but it just came to life with an ordinary glow. The filament inside didn’t writhe like a snake. It was just a light.

The basement had been completely cleaned out, the floor scrubbed within an inch of its life. The walls had been painted white. There was no sound of dripping water and no gust of wind.

Samuel had come down those stairs more times than he wanted to remember, at first always with his mum and then sometimes without her, and he’d never stopped knowing what was down at the bottom. It had never been a pet. It had never had good days, only less bad ones.

He knew what it felt like. He hadn’t forgotten that, not even in all his years away from home.

And he felt none of that now. It was gone, and it wasn’t meeting him here. The new white walls seemed to mock him: _what did you expect? This house belongs to someone else now, Samuel, and the Babadook belongs to you. It’s only yours. It will only ever be yours, because you’re not having any kids, are you? You own it, and the things you own always own you back._

“What do you want from me?” he said quietly.

The basement swallowed up the sound. There was nobody there to answer him.

There was a catch in his throat.

“Mum?” Look at him, practically middle-aged now and crying for his mother, who had known how to deal with the monsters.

He’d known what to do once, hadn’t he? He had gotten her to sick it up, when things had been at their worst. He’d helped, anyway. He’d fought it. But you couldn’t get it out, not really, not forever. You just had to drive it somewhere—

Somewhere safe.

His mum had kept his dad’s things down here, once. It hadn’t just been an empty space, it had been a precious one—precious and nasty all at the same time, like all the knotted-up and filthy things the Babadook was had come from here and had to go back here to live, too. Something had festered in the dark, and it could live in the dark, too, if you could let it. If you could cut off the part of yourself that needed to live there with it.

It wasn’t his house anymore. This wasn’t his dark place. It wasn’t what he’d dragged around, year after year, not really. If it had been, he’d never have gotten rid of it. He might never have lived in it again, but he would have kept it. Driven by it sometimes. Like a sore tooth you couldn’t keep yourself from tonguing at.

“I think I know now,” he said.

This place wasn’t listening to him. The Babadook wasn’t there, and neither was his mum. She was gone, and he was alone, and he had always been bad with people and not many had ever loved him, which made the loneliness worse. It even made it feel like it closed in around him so tight that he couldn’t breathe or sleep.

But that was what the Babadook ate. That was what it was made of.

And in the end, you had to feed it that; you had to get it out of yourself, like a blood clot that would kill you if it went on where it was.

This was his life. Whatever part of it he’d had here and whatever part he’d had somewhere else, whatever was in his future that he couldn’t even imagine—it was his. All that belonged to him too.

Samuel went home, and he took the sleeping bag he hadn’t unrolled in over ten years. Spiders had laid eggs in it, little silken lumps like caviar, but they had left the crossbow itself alone. It was rubbish, probably, but it was, he thought, all right work for a seven-year-old. He thought, for the first time in his life, _I wasn’t such a bad kid._

He’d been afraid of his closet when he’d been a kid. He couldn’t put the Babadook in one of them. It wasn’t safe. It was just more of being scared. He wasn’t giving anything up by trying to catch it in the closet, and all the dirt and worms in the world wouldn’t have fed it there. But Samuel knew where it wouldn’t starve. He knew where safety and horror had always gotten mixed up together for him; he knew where to feed his Babadook.

He took the crossbow into the bedroom and knelt down beside the bed.

It was empty under the bed. He had never put anything there, never in a dozen different beds.

Under the bed was where you hid from monsters. He had known that as a kid, and he still knew it now.

Weapons and terror and hiding and all the fucked-up parts of his childhood, of his life. If you didn’t cut off the dead part of yourself, if you didn’t feed it to someone, the rot of it would kill you in the end.

Samuel slid the crossbow all the way under the bed and stood up again, feeling lightheaded.

“There,” he said to the room. To the shadow behind the door, which had fingers like long ribbons, like scissor blades, like talons. It spoke with a croaking roar, trying to talk over him, trying to scream him down, but Samuel knew this game better than anyone. He could scream louder. He could scream longer. “There, it’s your place, that’s where you belong. Get down. Get _down_. There’s only one place you belong here, and you know it, so _go down where you belong, dammit_.”

 _You could have been a championship screamer,_ his mum had said to him once.

He believed her. And as the Babadook slipped into place, down in the dark and the dust, he even believed there’d be a time when he could think of her without it hurting.

***

Years later, someone—someone who didn’t love him yet but might love him later—woke Samuel up in the small hours of the morning. He rolled over, his head still a gray jumble, only half-awake.

“I think there was an earthquake. The bed was shaking.”

Samuel rubbed some of the sleep out of his eyes. “It does that sometimes,” he said, thinking he would have to go out to the garden and dig deep, wrestle up some pitch-black earth. “We’re on a fault line, I think. It’s nothing. Just—unquiet, a little, now and then. You learn to live with it.”

He dangled his arm off the side of the bed, like a promise: _I’m still here, don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten you_. Something sharp and cold touched him, twining tighter and tighter around his fingers—

“It’s fine,” Samuel said, like he was still talking to someone else. He could have been talking about earthquakes. “It’s all right.”

What was holding him let go. The papercuts it left behind were always shallow now, like the pages of its book had gotten softer from long handling.


End file.
